The Nabis

Let’s hear it for pretty pictures. For at least a hundred years, people have been taught that the thing they instinctively look for in a picture – you know, beauty – wasn’t really what art was about at all.

But then there were those pesky, eye-pleasing Nabis. This group (the name means prophet in Hebrew), consisting of Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, and Ker-Xavier Roussel, didn’t go down the modernist path of reductionism and abstraction, didn’t fracture reality into cubist shards or reduce it to amoeboid shapes.

They painted gardens and groves, interiors and streetscapes, biblical scenes and the cavorting of the Greek and Roman gods. But there was nothing conservative or academic about them. They took plenty of chances, not least in being unafraid to paint beautiful pictures. This can be seen in the Metropolitan Museum’s new show (opening Tuesday and in members previews now), “Beyond the Easel: Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel, 1890-1930,” one of the most gorgeous exhibits to be seen in New York in years.

It’s a perfect opportunity to rediscover this long-discredited aesthetic virtue. Beauty – surprise, surprise – makes us happy. We become joyful upon contact with it. It makes us feel that life has a magical dimension, after all. It makes us wish we were painters.

And there’s the additional reward here of getting big portions of artists usually doled out in tiny amounts. Bonnard and Vuillard come by the acre in this show.

The title is a little misleading. “Decorative” sounds minor – as in the “decorative arts,” meaning crafts. In fact, what these artists were advocating was a return to wall-painting, like the great frescoes or murals of the past. The ultimate goal was art that surrounded one, as with Monet and his water lilies and Whistler and his Peacock Room.

The Nabis were all born around the same time – 1867 to 1870 – and all lived into the 1940s, which brings them closer to the present time than we might have thought. They formed their brotherhood in art school in the 1880s, and saw themselves as the spiritual heirs to Paul Gauguin, who had carved a new style out of impressionism using arbitrary colors, flat shapes, and symbolism. This emphasis on flatness and the arrangement of colors and shapes – as opposed to a window on the world – is also sometimes described as “decorative,” lending another meaning to the show’s title.

This is the first exhibit to focus on these artists’ decorative works, mostly large-scale wall paintings, portable since they were painted on cardboard or canvas before being applied to the walls.

There’s an extra thrill to paintings that fill up your entire field of vision. Vuillard, master of cozy domestic interiors, seems to have effortlessly made the jump to monumentality with a painting of the French countryside that is 8 feet high and more than 12 feet long. This is impressionism minus the flickering, flat but not airless, and with every piece of topography – cypress tree, barn, bush, cultivated field – clicking into place like inlaid wood.

Vuillard’s skill in orchestrating large complex spaces is also evident in his several treatments of the Place Vintimille – a pleasant Parisian square, viewed from above, in which our eye is directed along the curving sidewalk surrounding the park, pausing along the way to take in urban vignettes: vendors, strollers, loafers, dogs, card players on a bench. In one sweeping canvas, the foreground is occupied by a massive excavation project, which detracts not at all from the charm of the scene.

There’s nothing duller than artists all trying to conform to some manifesto, and fortunately the four Nabis followed their own temperaments. Denis, for example, is the most art nouveau-ish of the bunch, stylizing his figures and enclosing them in strong outlines. These simplified figures, often of women in long dresses moving about a dreamlike landscape, evoke a spiritual feeling.

His “Decorations for the Bedroom of a Young Girl” is a lovely stream of images: figures of young girls and women in scenes of betrothals, marriages, and mothering that circled the original room like a frieze. Denis’ spirituality could shade over into spookiness, however, and there’s a hint of that in some of the nighttime scenes of gardens and doves in the moonlight. When Denis designed furniture for the little girl’s room, critics complained that the dark gray pieces resembled “tombs.”

A devout Catholic, Denis wound up doing a lot of religious commissions, but also painted mythological subjects for more worldly clients. These more elaborately worked-up scenes included nude bathers and a “Bacchanale,” a scene of pagan lust in which a topless woman is seen dancing with a tiger.

Roussel, who married Vuillard’s older sister, has the least in common with the other painters. He abandoned the flat Nabi style very early, and worked more illusionistically, with short, vigorous brush strokes and bright colors. He suffered a mental breakdown during World War I, and the exhibit has studies for two murals he was asked to do while recuperating in a Swiss asylum. These allegories of spring and autumn show trees budding or shedding fruit, while naked figures drink wine and carry on.

Roussel did a lot of theatrical design, and many of his mural commissions reflect his involvement in the arts, such as his “Afternoon of a Faun,” a scene he did for a famous baritone of the day, and loosely based on a scene from the poem by Mallarme, in which a faun comes upon two nymphs in the woods and ravishes them both.

Everything Bonnard did has the sparkle of genius and the sense of an artistic imagination that was given complete freedom to roam. “Screen With Rabbits,” which juxtaposes images of frolicking rabbits and the amorous couplings of a satyr and nymph, was inspired – as was much by the Nabis – by Japanese art.

The large decorative ensemble he did for the alluring Misia Natanson Edwards (who was both muse and patron to the Nabis) are among his most fanciful. The three monumental canvases – the biggest is more than 16 feet wide – have the orangy color of faded tapestries. They depict Arcadian and pastoral themes: women playing ball and children playing, shepherds and nymphs, exotic animals and aquatic beasts. But, their strangest feature are the meandering borders filled with acrobatic monkeys and magpies entwined with strings of pearls – subjects said to reflect an incident in Edwards’ life in which her husband’s mistress demanded her pearls – among other things – to give up the husband.

Bonnard dominates the climax of the show, with a skylit gallery that shows off his sun-filled “Mediterranean,” displayed with half-columns separating the three Panels, as it was originally installed in the home of a Moscow collector. Also in this room are several of Bonnard’s famous “Terrace” paintings, depicting a table set for lunch, some figures, masses of foliage, and layers of distant landscape, all painted in Bonnard’s characteristically rich palette.

These were painted for himself, not as commissions, and yet it’s possible to see how his mural work, with its large scale and Arcadian themes, prepared Bonnard to paint these masterpieces.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

2001